One important aspect for making new housing construction or a remodeling project appear well built and add value to a home, condo or other building is the trim molding. Trim molding may be placed about various places within a building including door and window frames as well as around upper edges between walls and ceilings. Other decorative trim moldings such as chair moldings also dress a building to be attractive.
Often trim molding is made from a plurality of separate trim members that are connected together at a tight joint to form a continuous looking unitary member. The trim can often be shellacked, or painted to further hide and conceal the joint. A poorly installed trim molding that forms a gap within the joint is detractive and undesirable.
A problem with many installed trim moldings is that while they are often assembled correctly with tight joints that is either invisible or barely noticeable, after the elapse of time, settling of the new underlying construction will often pull apart the joint and form a crack in the paint coating or otherwise make the make the joint noticeably visible with a large unsightly gap. Older settled buildings often have quite large and noticeably unsightly gaps between trim members. While extra nails and screws can secure a joint, the nails and screws are either undesirably exposed or require wood putty to conceal them. The extra wood putty is also undesirable because it does not take stain well or it dries up and pops out.
The settling and gapping of the trim joint is exacerbated by the common interposition of drywall between the trim member and a supporting stud member or the like. Drywall is not a structural support member. Thus, the spacing of the trim member from the supporting stud member due to the interposition of drywall reduces the lateral rigidity provided by the nail. In other words, the long extension of the nail from the trim member through the drywall and to the stud member reduces the lateral rigidity provided by the nail.
What is needed is a concealed trim molding system that retains tight trim joints together and resists separation of the trim members. What is also needed is a system that secures the trim members together on the exterior side of any drywall.